Alyssa Monks

Artist Alyssa Monks always painted women. She started with the self-portraits and then took a detour to paint family members. Her bathing beauties evolve directly from photographs while she intentionally adds a lot of invention to them in her paintings.

It seems like water is the overall theme to them and Alyssa says that the water thing kind of found her, and she evolved into it. She has a memory of painting when she was 14 or 15 years old and found an image of water, but it was too hard to paint. So, it was a personal milestone to paint water. She loves the way water plays with the flesh; how it added distortion and abstraction, how it could create new texture. So she decided I was using water as a filter. Creating a filter really spoke to her as a way to draw the viewer in. Putting a barrier in between the viewer and the subject invites the viewer to work a little harder.

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iGNANT is an interdisciplinary Berlin-based blog featuring creatives in the fields of art, design, photography and architecture. Editor in chief, Caroline Kurze and the team behind iGNANT is dedicated to the picture, to moods and esthetics, finding its expression in our in-house productions of photographs, videos and original written content.